The Incident should be closed by the owner of the Incident. If ownership stays with the Service Desk, the analyst responsible for that Incident needs to be the one who finally closes it.

They are able to close it when:
The Customer has been contacted to ensure that the Service has indeed been restored.

Right now, we're undergoing the change from closing without confirmation to putting it into resolved, then calling the Customer, then confirming it can be closed. We already know from our SDMs that the Customers can see a difference and are appreciating the additional communication.

The closure of a ticket should be a responsibility of the owner of the ticket. Also a closure confirmation from the end user is the right way of doing it. There should be a comfortable period between resolution of the ticket and the closure of the ticket, e.g. between 5 - 10 days. This can be arrived by after discussing with the user community.

But, from personal experience, I have realised that ticket closure usually becomes an over head for the already busy service desk team. We have proposed and successfully implemented an auto closure rule, were in all the tickets with low priority get auto closed. For the High priority tickets we sticket to the manual process. Going with the 80-20 rule, 80% of the tickets which are low / medium priority are auto closed and only 20% is something that the service desk needs to worry about.

as already mentioned on another post, if possible, you could have 2 types of closure:
* technical closure from the person/entity who did restore the service
* administrative closure from the SD when user confirms situation is back to normal.

Resolutions can be completed by technical support staff of 2nd or 3rd line. Our end users automatically receive an e-mail confirming the closure and stating that if the issue has not been resolved to their satisfaction that they should contact us immediately to unresolve the call.

Closures are completed by the service desk staff 24 hours after resolution. Aside from the customer agreement issue, it is also an opportunity to perform quality checks on the technical staff resolutions and follow-up where necessary.

We are currently having a good debate on resolution vs closure with the customer and need to clarify 1 thing:
Does Resolver Group contact user to confirm that the incident has been resolved, put the incident ticket to resolved status, and then pass incident back to Service Desk to confirm closure?

The one who should contact the customers for confirmation is the Service Desk, in compliance with the SPOC function.
So, once the incident has been resolved, the resolver group passes back to SD. SD clarifies with the customer and upon clarification, the ticket is closed.

In some case, the Resolver Group might communicate with the customer in the testing phase (for instance, because only the customer who has authorization to access a tested application).
But the clarification should be done by SD